Best show this season? Forward Unto Dawn. Made by, wait for it, Microsoft!

Battlestar Galactica meets Space Above and Beyond meets Halo! The production quality of this live-action series is better than anything on “television” right now. Period. Corbulo is the academy for poor cadet Lasky (the star of at least this episode), he is suffering from family troubles and cryogenic-training blisters. In this pre-Halo world it’s a battle against separatists.

Yahoo: Halo: Forward Unto Dawn is a 90-minute live-action version of the popular sci-fi gaming franchise. It will be broken into five 15-minute chunks and released each Friday up until the launch of Halo 4 on Nov. 6.

This show is hard. And, it’s gritty. Both are qualities I hate in a show. But, Halo isn’t trying too hard with this one. It’s not like those trailers for earlier Halo editions. “Forward Unto Dawn” is realistic sci-fi series with some action, heart, and Wart Hogs!

It all takes place around 2526. Cadet Silva (a girl with a British accent) reviews a contemporary news report “Insurrectionists kill dozens in attack on civilian spaceport” reading “Insurrection representatives are claiming responsibility for the deadly bomb attach yesterday on a lodestone spaceport used almost exclusively by civilian passengers…”

“Initial casualty reports of 13 dead and 47 wounded have risen to 26 fatalities and 64 severely wounded as of upload time. Hundreds more have been treated and released by area hospitals for smaller injuries and smoke inhalation. Officials say the bomb was carried into the space port in a duffle bad, but at this time they are responding to questions about how it evaded port systems…”

And I like to think that as they show off believable, normal-looking, yet futuristic and impossible tech (something that Battlestar Galactica did every episode) the were intentional when they showed off their Minority report "(Kinect-like) communication terminal, and tons of in-game candy (like the space tether).

Since the story revolves around a bunch of kids, the storylines are clearly less “heavy” than a bunch of guys getting mowed by the covenant. The first scene makes me think we are seeing the backstory to a soldier who will eventually move to rescue Master Chief. And then (spoiler alert), there’s that thing in the sky…

Come get some!

Yahoo: Several years worth of rumors floated around a Halo movie, but plans were publicly scrapped. Publishing it online was a way for Microsoft to sidestep much of the Hollywood politics. McCloskey says work started on the 90-minute feature in January, and the executive producers spent a lot of time pushing it through. Publishing on Machinima, which receives 2 billion video views a month, allows anyone around the world to see Forward Unto Dawn.